The most striking thing about "Regret" is how little it asks for. The speaker doesn't plead for forgiveness or blame circumstances. They set down, in plain sentences, a debt they can no longer repay. Two women, now people the speaker "used to know," wrote words that survive. The speaker admits, "shamefully," to having given neither of them "the true gift of attention." The central idea is that being loved is not the same as noticing that you are loved, and that this failure of noticing can only be seen clearly once it is too late to fix.
The poem is built on an exchange of gifts that doesn't balance. The women's gifts are concrete: "From Saint Christopher / to Blue John Stones." Saint Christopher is traditionally the protector of travellers, and Blue John is a banded, purple-blue stone, so the imagery suggests keepsakes and charms offered as protection. Against these the speaker sets one abstract, unglamorous thing they failed to give: attention. That is the poem's quiet sting. Attention costs nothing to buy, yet it was the one thing the speaker couldn't produce.
The word "everything" shows how the poem is stitched together. The speaker's "selfish sadness" is "destroying everything," and four lines later the women "gave me everything." The repetition sets the two forces side by side, one generous and one ruinous, and shows which won. The phrase "selfish sadness" also deserves a second look. Sadness normally earns sympathy, but here the speaker judges it harshly, and the sibilance of the two words gives them a hiss of self-reproach. The "boundary of my affliction" is a more clinical phrase, as if the speaker were drawing a map of the prison they were in. The poem never names the affliction, which keeps the focus on its effect, a narrowing of vision: "I could not see / beyond."
The form carries this feeling too. There is no rhyme and no steady metre, just short, uneven stanzas of two or three lines, like a confession delivered in breaths. The ampersands ("& shamefully," "& with that grace," "& let each future be") give the poem a hurried, handwritten look, as though it were jotted down before the nerve failed. Then there is the one-line stanza "destroying everything.." It is cut off from the sentence that produced it and left alone on the page, so the destruction gets a space of its own. The double full stop is odd, neither a clean full stop nor a proper ellipsis. It reads like a voice trailing off, or a typing slip that the speaker can't be bothered to fix, which suits a moment too heavy for tidiness.
The final stanzas turn on an ambiguity. "With that grace, with those / prayers I drank & laughed" can be read two ways. The speaker may have swallowed the women's kindness like a drink, or may have drunk and laughed *despite* their prayers, using their blessing as cover for carrying on. The poem leaves both readings open, and both are damning. "Grace" and "prayers" also pick up the religious note of Saint Christopher, so what was offered was something close to a blessing, and it was taken without being felt.
The last couplet is the hardest: "& let each future be / consumed by the past." The verb "let" matters because it makes the speaker complicit. Nobody forced the futures to be lost, and they were allowed to go. "Consumed" echoes "drank" and "destroying," so the vocabulary of appetite and ruin runs through the whole poem. "Each future" is plural, which suggests many possible lives and many chances, not one. The poem ends on "the past," with no consolation or resolution.
What gives the poem weight is that it refuses to flatter its speaker. Many poems about regret slide into self-pity, but this one stays accountable. There is also a reading in which the poem is itself the attention that was missing then: it is a careful look at two people, and at what they gave, offered at last. The handle "wordsforghosts" fits this, since the poem is words addressed to people who are, at least in some sense, no longer there. For a reader, the lesson is a gentle but pointed one: notice people while they are still within reach.